How to make work stress work for you

The work you didn't finish before Friday is now overdue, while the short week ahead means cramming extra hours just to get back on top of your inbox, and then there's the meetings with the "difficult" boss to get through. If you are silently screaming "argh" at your PC, take comfort, you will certainly not be alone.

Yet, new research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience shows that stress can be good for us in unexpected ways. The report from the University of Vienna in April found that stress is not just an essential psychobiological mechanism without which we could not survive, helping us to manage threatening situations. But also it can lead to an increase in pro-social behavior.

That possibility that stress can be beneficial is one explored in by professor Ian Robertson, co-director of the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin and one of the world's leading researchers in neuropsychology, which is about to be published in paperback. In the book, Robertson examines Nietzsche's proposition "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger" - the idea that individuals can learn to harness their own power, as opposed to being subjects of forces over which they had little control.